MY STORY

There isn't a more important artist alive today than the one living inside of you.

-elizabeth izzo

An evolving story, a herstory...
This outline is proving to be the needed material that I am committed to writing my memoirs from. Thank-you and may we all receive healing from the telling of our herstories!

Born Resilient, Sensitive and Strong

(trigger warning, as a survivor this narrative gives light to some trauma)

Life was not going to be without its challenges, so the core characteristics of resilience, sensitivity and strength would serve to guide me and establish a foundation for survival and as time and an in-practice philosophy unfolded, move me towards a path informed by my sensitivity and honoring the healer within. This story is not about placing blame, it is about moving from victimization into empowerment. I know I was loved and I continue to be. This is the gift of coming into a greater depth of understanding and growth. Traumatic events happen and they happen to all of us...things we cannot control and sometimes never move forward from. If we are without ample supports that speak to a need for navigating these occurrences in a loving, compassionate and safe way, we can become or perceive ourselves as lost, outside of our ability to respond and in a state of stagnation and reaction based on historical patterning. Not fully living. Yet those indicators are where the potential for healing and integration live. It is with re-membering all parts of ourselves that we are able to engage with a deeper understanding into our own ability to personally transform and transcend past life experiences.

My path - beginning with a difficult birth, in which I was breech, therefore leading my mother and I both through a painful and dangerous experience was the principal point of my evolving story which would unfold through decades of what became a life of adversity. In my twenties, through Rebirthing Breathwork Therapy, I went back in time to this painful experience of entryway into the world. I (re)connected to my soul family of origin and I felt immense unconditional love, support and heartfelt appreciation for what efforts I had been making to - in many ways, self-navigate as a child. Later I would also feel incredible grief. My soul had been pre-informed that I would suffer greatly in this human incarnation. I now see this difficult birth marked by my soul's hesitancy to come forth and endure the kind of sustained darkness I would come to know. That darkness was a path marked with the tragic loss of my partner and young baby daughter's father, chronic family dysfunction -including domestic violence and abuse, alcohol abuse, misogyny, racism and narcissism,my parent's divorce, my own acute and chronic illness, early childhood and teen sexual trauma, assault, abandonment, abduction, iatrogenic harm, the list goes on. Perhaps because of my heritage as a Italian-American, and my father's prestige in his career, (well on his way to becoming an award winning film-editor and later Hall of Fame recipient), it was not the case that outside intervention was sought for the domestic violence plaguing my home. The secrets remained behind closed doors,keeping all within "sick".

Strict codes of family loyalty were enforced, not civil laws. Thus a core wounding of
unworthiness was imprinted upon me. That wound and its story plus others I had deflected that were targeted at my mother, would both unconsciously lead me and as my path unfolded, consciously come to serve me.

Light in the Darkness

One thing that provided stability and needed creative and intellectual stimulation plus a sense of community - even if I felt an outsider, was my elementary school years at a Catholic parish in a upper middle class suburb of Chicago. The education I received laid a strong foundation for applications as a future scholar and first generation university graduate. I had friends - I especially loved my time with my male counterparts - they were like my soul brothers - my tribe mates. I enjoyed their energy of exploration and a kind of passion and confidence that perhaps only boys might have been allowed to explore in such times. And although I was never completely able to conform to my own religion, I was introduced to the Goddess, The Mother Mary. This would prove to be critical for my spiritual path....an enlightened and ascended master, a WOMAN - the woman who gave birth to the son of God even. To my understanding, no other Christian faith places Mary in this kind of esteem. Sure there is an advantageous context for a Christian faith to include Goddess worship - no matter what the context, this theme mattered to me. My fondness and connection to Mary provided a needed connection to what I now know is The Divine Feminine, an emerging and needed healing energy for our world as we experience patriarchal collapse.

Misfortune as a Guide

During those years and as a young teen, my older brothers were away at boarding school. There was less energy to navigate yet my parent's marriage was not improving. One day during a heated argument, they put me into unjust and inappropriate circumstance by bringing me into the fate of their marriage. As a young empath and not having any language for the chronic chaos and stress I was absorbing, I was needing and ready for relief. You can imagine my response to them in this situation...
Years earlier, at the age of six I had contracted shingles from the daily stress I was experiencing which contributed to a weakened immune system. I was temporarily moved into isolation into my parent's room. I missed one month of first grade schooling while my father nursed me. It was both a painful and nurturing experience. I was getting one on one attention and also a needed buffer from the day to day stress of a continuing drama that was my family life. I still was not aware of my sensitivities or nature as an empath (both being a certain part of the population that is hyper sensitive to energies and can experience other's energies as their own, plus possess an ability to develop a highly tuned intuition). I simply began to believe everyone else was experiencing reality in the same way and coping better than I was. I do not recall anyone pointing out my sensitive nature. I was mastering a kind of adaptation to cope. Adapting, I have learned may not be the best option. I have come to allow for and learn how to make adjustments, like a flowing bending river. I come back to my ability to adjust.

As that young child, I did not know how to process the intense pain of this ailment and the unique circumstances around it. The left side of my neck was covered in burning blisters and I could not tolerate the touch of even my own clothing against it. I began to secretly visit the kitchen and eat early in the morning time - not knowing I had emotions that were stirring and sensations overwhelming me, all energies that were overloading me. I certainly did not have examples of how to cope with discomfort in a healthier way. This led to a slight weight gain - which led to more external wounding. It was not ok in my family, nor safe for me as a young girl (or woman) to carry extra weight. I endured years of inappropriate focused attention and verbal abuse - coming from both parents and sometimes classmates. It would take decades before I was able to ask my mother to stop commenting on my appearance. I now understand this behavior as having more to do with my parents and less to do with me. Which is really what adverse childhood experiences reveal...not about the child, but about circumstances beyond a child's control.

I also now understand that to embrace our imperfections is a practice of loving kindness towards the self, an unconditional nurturance that only we can provide to ourselves.

The truth is we are loved, and we are imperfect - that is simply to say, we are human. Each day my path reminds me that I long to be dancing with a holy communion and living in trust.

"Compulsions are our guides back into (this) connection, one that relaxes our minds, opens our hearts, and brings a twinkle to our eyes. They are not evidence that you are weak-willed or defective. Rather, they are powerful forces that are here to heal you to your core."
MARY O'MALLEY, THE GIFT OF OUR COMPULSIONS

Perfection may be for our fully divine self whom I believe lives on in the spiritual plane - who is to say? I experience my divinity as my soul, made in the Creator's image. While I have a body, also made of Creator and Earth and Sky, it is my intention to embrace my humanity as a gift. This gift embodies as much soul integration and evolution as I can create from this experience. I have learned to be with and return to my discomforts in a practice of self love. This is my birthright, my claim to sovereignty. Because I know I have always possessed courage, I was either consciously or unconsciously summoning it to assist me in a lifetime of navigation through a journey of self-initiation. Courage can be cultivated.

Coexistence of New Life and Experienced Loss

Shortly after I left my family of origin and moved in with my lover, partner and future father of my daughter, Tom, at age 18, I became severely ill from an undiagnosed and therefore improperly treated viral infection of Hepatitis A. It was not until what would have been our wedding day, that I saw another doctor at our local rural clinic, (after my mother thankfully made a call and asked our family doctor - whom also saw patients out of this clinic, to look in on me that morning), that I was given a correct diagnosis and sent straight to hospital. The wedding and reception- which was already planned for in spite of my being unable to eat, drink or leave my bed for weeks, was also planning to be stopped by my father and his family allies. I had no idea exactly how since I was legally of age to marry and I was far too ill to care about a reception or executed charge into my wedding day... every ounce of energy was spent hanging on, suffering in great pain, emptiness, confusion and darkness. By the time I returned to the clinic that morning with Tom and my brother, I was deliriously wrapped in a comforter repeating over and over again in the waiting area, I AM REALLY SICK! I could not fathom that I actually had to wait to be seen in this state - it was inhumane. My soul was barely holding it together to stay in my diseased and languishing body. I just somehow did. My mother had seen the severity of my illness, she knew it was serious. Who I was living with or planning to marry became secondary to her maternal instincts which were to keep me ALIVE. After I was properly diagnosed - jaundiced, with urine the color of Pepsi (he actually tested me unlike the previous doctor that was injecting me with Penicillin and sending me home to further languish), I told the doctor I was supposed to be married this day. He simply laughed and responded, "not today". I was in isolation for 11 days except for Tom being allowed visitation. Years later my mother told me that the doctor told her, if she makes it through the night, she will survive. It was a dark experience all around. My first hospitalization around so much madness, toxic energy, betrayal, salvation, desperation...I felt alone and unsure of anything. There was no occasion for the grief that I needed to feel nor recognition of the need to feel it. When I learned I was pregnant during this stay, I did know one thing. Considering what I was experiencing, I felt I could only manage one of those commitments at a time. Even unconsciously, something was informing me at a core level. My instinct was to take it slower. I had already heard my intuition speak to me since my partnering with Tom which clearly heard stated: you are supposed to have a child with him. So I did, and I did not marry him at that time. I needed more time to know if he would be the man for me and perhaps more time seeing him as a father would inform me? I made decisions on my own authority and they were clearly not in line with social norms during this time.

Still, I never planned on being or becoming a single parent. More about how this came to be later on.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Decades later, another majorly significant event led me into a Dark Night of the Soul, came through my "care" as a psychiatric patient in my early forties in the mental health care system of Bloomington, Indiana. Primarily my treatment was delivered through the clinic, Centerstone (then CBH). In addition, I was part of a portal that included (then) Bloomington Hospital and their own internal medicine clinics. This left me without much objectivity since the whole system fed off of a kind of incestuous relationship partnering. Even more strangely, the mental health clinic acted as if they were primary care and not specialized care. This led to a dictatorial relationship between clinicians and consumers.

After a breakup with my third fiancé, I sought psychiatric intervention. The breakup took me into a territory unlike any other previously experienced. The shock of the split - which I had initiated, felt as if God/Spirit had abandoned me...the landscape altered and I could not make it shift.

After years of being overly medicated, misdiagnosed, and in repeated crisis leading to many hospitalizations, I was eventually shuffled to a new practitioner. She had replaced my resident psychiatrist since he had left the country relocating to New Zealand. (Interestingly, New Zealand and the USA are the only two countries that legally allow direct to consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs on television). Without any warning or plan for tapering, this literally unnamed practitioner walked into my appointment and announced she was abruptly taking me off of a benzodiazepine medication (without a taper) claiming I was a drug addict. I looked at her and said, "And your name is?"

I had no idea what hellish nightmare would then unfold. Involuntary addiction was something I had never heard of. There continues to be much misinformation and controversy surrounding the long term use of benzodiazepines. I am lived experience in this arena.

This crisis was dealt during a precarious time in my life. The only doctor that was prepared to humanely assist me within Bloomington became unavailable, as fate would have it. I also lacked an informed support system. Most of the people I knew, my friends, had substance abuse issues. Not surprising coming from my background. Having raised my daughter, I was experiencing a combination of my own resurfacing late adolescence and a new found freedom of sorts. I did frequently "party" although not at all doable during periods of massive overmedicating. However, I had gone through a day program for substance abuse years earlier when I entered the psychiatric system. Upon completion, I was found not to be an addict. So the news that a file portrayed me as an addict was startling. The mental health clinic providing me care all these years subsequently NEVER drug tested me (cept one accurtance when I demanded it as proof of the sham), nor held me accountable to any recovery program.

The withdrawal episode was grossly ill-timed in many ways. I had a trip planned to visit my daughter in Prague and refused to let this craziness stop me. I did get a supply of medication prescribed for the trip from my GP. But for some unknown reason to me, the costs were not going through my insurance and I left with a plan to get them sent as soon as the insurance copay kicked in. I was not getting any insights through the clinic's case manager during this time as to why my insurance had shifted. The whole fiasco was mismanaged. Once you are in a system that has a level of this much dysfunction, you pretty much are fast tracking to becoming a statistic. And going through a withdrawal in and of itself is no time for able bodied managing of one's own affairs. There was no one managing any of it. When you can disguise a withdrawal and its side effects and pretend it is just isolated psychosis- which is what ensued, people tend to believe the doctors. In this case, I did not have safe advocates in my own group of friends or my own family. Thankfully, some of my daughter's friends held space for me during much suffering. This gesture got me through many tough times. It would have been easier to give up and end the suffering.

I did what I could to survive, to endure. That meant supplementing with my own pain medications and street drugs to keep somewhat of an edge off, to temper the extreme symptoms including sleep deprivation- which led to further complications. Months into the withdrawal I was finally hospitalized and given anti-seizure medications while my vitals were checked hourly. It was during this period - which resulted in a myriad of physiological challenges ushered in by a rapid decline in my body's autonomic functioning, that continued incorrect psychiatric pathologies were assigned to me. I was threatened with state institutionalization if I did not comply and consume prescribed medication in hospital.

That same GP would also prove to be substandard. She was a friend of a friend that I saw socially on occasion and most likely should not have been seeing her "friends" as patients. When I got back from Prague, I asked her to check my thyroid and she refused. I ended up in a mild hypothermic state in crisis with my thyroid levels well off and in hospital again. Even in this infirmed and chronic state, I knew the practitioners attending to me were far more lost than I could ever be, and also shockingly incompetent. I had awareness. I went into the hell that is modern psychiatry - a field heavily populated with wounded individuals legally drugging trauma survivors- in full distress, to modify their brain chemistry and behavior as to be more "acceptable" to the social norms. In some cases to even exploit their compromised states further. Personally, I was stalked by one of my case managers from Centerstone who had developed an attraction to me. She violated our professional boundaries by calling well after hours to invite me on a date, framing it as an outside the box kind of session. Despite reporting this incident, there was no change in her status. I was coaxed into terminating my professional relationship with her.

Awakening through Crisis

I have done considerable research on the history of psychiatry since and had I not read Stan and Christina Grof and known of Spiritual Emergency, I would have no context for this crisis and awareness around what was really happening with me during it. I was awakening because of the consequences of the medication withdrawal, my consciousness was altered. My own vision was now heightened to include much broader spheres of dimension. There was no going back.

It took years of persistence and movement - not always forwardly, to begin to come together again in my body. I was living like a spiral from the inside out slowly regenerating, at what seemed a snail's pace. I had to accept that I would not be the person who went into that experience on the other side of it. This was a painful reality to accept, much less embrace. I was living with protracted Benzodiazepine Withdrawal Syndrome, I had undiagnosed autoimmune challenges, my thyroid had not been tended to properly during the withdrawal. I was unable to make art. I felt physically and spiritually flatlined. I experienced this trauma as one of betrayal since it was initiated by my practitioners. It took time, more initiation through trauma, faith and spiritual assistance - from guides and ancestors. Sometimes supports came in and out of my life as quickly as they emerged. It took years for me be able to appreciate that I had survived this period. The reason I know there is no hell afterlife, is because I recognize humans are the only entities capable of creating such a nightmare. We are either creating from a place of love, or not.

It took me coming back to nature, to ritual, to shamanic practice, to selfcare in a more dedicated way. It took learning how to love and care for myself - deeply and intentionally. It took safe counsel and support to begin to say, NO. I would have to give myself permission to show up as the artist and woman I was in that moment, and learn to do this again and then again. I would learn to apply great courage, but also the willingness to fail if I were to ever succeed. I would have to learn that I defined my own ability and success. It took learning to take myself and my life more seriously, giving reverence to my life in a mindful way. It is still a practice I follow. I am grateful and blessed to acknowledge, I have been free from psychiatric medications and care since 2014.

Beginning to Live Amends

In 2009 I saw my father through end of life care including hospice and was with him through his last breaths. It was not my first encounter supporting someone through their passing. I had been with my late partner Tom during his passing when I was just 21 years old. I relied heavily on my instincts to carry me through. In many ways, Tom's passing marked a threshold wherein what my family had been able to contain was blown open, fractured beyond any one person's ability to bring back together. The gift of our beautiful daughter Michelle had brought a new love and needed nurturance and hope to us all...Tom's accidental passing was a tragic death and had left us all in pain, gutted, and further dismembered as a family. During that time with my father, I allowed myself to continue to heal and to be seen as a caregiver with improved boundaries in place and holding a more authentic personhood for myself. I showed up as someone who truly cared about the quality of his care, his remaining time, and his passing. It was a way for me to begin to bring a newer story of myself into the old story dynamic.

I knew through my own suffering how empathic care for him was needed at this time, and more importantly I wanted to provide it and share time with him which became precious to the both of us. It was not an easy time, at all. The round the clock care was intense, and I was met with belligerent opposition and diminished value from others. I was bullied by my siblings. However, I did have some family supports that I reached out to and heavily leaned on who were showing up for me. I succumbed to more illness from the external stressors, unrealistic demands, lack of time to decompress and process and a lack of support by my siblings after I had finished caring for our father. I was later cut out of his estate by my brother, the Executor of my father's Will. This was painful for me on its own. But when considering I had been the sole family caregiver to our mother for decades - without any family financial contributions, it stung. There had been red flags all along the path with this relationship - some dangerous. What would it take for me to "get" that my own brother was not actually on my team? This relationship was the most difficult of all with my siblings for me to accept this truth, it was toxic for me. Hurt people, hurt people. This goes both ways. I have made mistakes in relationships - this I know. My humanity was and is crystal clear. Still, I have come to know my parents and my family love(d) me and love one another. Yes, bridges have been burned. None of us can undo the past nor change another. We cannot make someone else be in relationship with us in a loving and caring way - to the best of our abilities. This takes a willingness on both accounts. Everyday within relationship with another and in relationship to our life in general is a new opportunity to show up with renewed interest in the commitment for evolving and for making a living amends.

To amend is to change. I have only the ability to change myself and my own behavior. I am not here to prove my worth or value to my family or anyone else. I belong. I have worth. I have value. I make meaningful contributions to the world. What others think about me, is none of my business! I can love and let go from a distance - one day at a time. I cannot say what the future holds. This too is part of the mystery to be allowed for and even embraced.

Years and what can seem like a lifetime of chaos were mostly not of my making, chances are they were not for you either. Much was well beyond my control of managing - no matter what unrealistic goals I put upon myself to bring order to the madness, and what skills I possessed to deliver outcomes that were heroic in nature.

In Search of A New Story

In 2014, I left my old story, literally - by leaving the midwest, my family and what community I had begun to cultivate on the other side of putting my life back into order since the psychiatric iatrogenic event, my father's death which was followed by my sister Diane's death (a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter)occurring around the time of my 50th. My mother was finally in a more safe scenario having secured a guardianship through an investigation that I prompted with the APS into her declining competencies. I saw her being exploited and neglected by her practitioners. Absolutely unacceptable. I had woken up to the bigger picture and as previously stated, there was no turning back. There I was. I had unmet needs. I had desires. I had dreams. I also had no plans to live in Oregon - it was California I had hoped to return to someday. However, a fated invitation guided me there and thus began what I now see as a kind of extended "Vision Quest" period. It would have me suffer more trauma including being hit by a self-proclaimed under oath distracted driver on my bike, the consequences of stigmatized healthcare delivery after the accident - partly because of a prior mental health diagnosis, by my new primary physician (whom I also determined to be incompetent and thus dangerous to my wellbeing - not uncommon), more disruptive activity around my thyroid management - all which led to a desperation in finding help for what I was physically enduring which was unsustained vitality, chronic pain and anxiety (all symptoms mind you, not distinct pathologies). I agreed to allow a naturopath through the National University of Natural Medicine treat me with experimental IV micronutrient push injections after she straight up looked me in the eyes and exuberantly proclaimed: "I can help you"! Months later I was overdosed on vitamin B6 and toxic with nerve damage. Yes, that happened. Being in a desperate state around anything in our life is far from ideal.

Prior to the cycling accident I was in a journey circle and doing soul retrieval work with an acclaimed and internationally known Shamanic Practitioner. I had discovered her podcasts, Why Shamanism Now, years earlier. It was like a dream come true to be working directly with her. While working with her and in the unfoldment of telling my story, I asked her if she thought my symptoms were a sign of Shamanic Illness? I actually recall her looking at me as if to convey she had never heard of it (not possible). She at least did not acknowledge the possibility. This absolutely threw me off. The day I was to begin ritual around the last journey work and during a Blood Moon Eclipse, was my bitter encounter with the front end of a quickly accelerating vehicle. I would not return to that practitioner. My challenge during this time - which included more loss was not to be defeated by it all. Again, I was being called to feel my grief and sadness, to learn to embrace and hold space for myself, to seek safe counsel, to disrupt patterning around unsafe company, to continue to claim my power as the healer within.

I had successfully begun to establish a name and reputation for myself in the clean food movement - part of my self care post-withdrawal was to integrate a food as medicine approach to my daily diet and routine. I had taken to interning and volunteering in gardens and farmsteads to learn more about organic growing and permaculture. I started my own garden in a lawn to pollinator plant and foodscape project. This engagement with plants and nature was feeding me on multiple levels. I was moving forward...interruptions and all. I was learning about my sensitive nature through an encounter with a meetup group, bringing my leadership skills back to the fore within the alternative art collective I had been living and working out of on the eastside of Portland. Alternative living conditions were teaching me more about myself through the mirroring inherent in relationships than I could barely keep up with. The time needed to process all this change seemed non-existent. Could I learn to guide my life at a pace that was reasonable for me? Could I remember to be grateful for all that is and not inventory all that was wrong and locked me into feeling oppressed and victimized including financial uncertainty?

I was navigating an urban environment, after being away from Chicago for 30 years, without a car, and living a lower carbon footprint in my micro studio which became my nest and cave - a place for shamanic practice and artmaking, selfcare and reflection. This is where the medicine of my healing modalities The Exquisite Mandala, sacred artmaking as Soul Retrieval practices, and my new story affirmation mantras were midwifed (not yet published yet available through my intensives). I was cultivating healing modalities around integration. I was learning to embrace alternative ways of understanding currency and worth by becoming a student of the New Story. I felt seen in this philosophy and those arising from it and within the global communities we change agents commonly occupy and are nourished within. For this I am blessed and eternally grateful.

Over time, I have learned and continue to sort out what is mine and what is not, to practice living with an ability to respond, to live with intention and not by default. I've learned the differences between caretaking and caregiving. I practice a path that returns me to serenity through surrender and into a trusting balance with my Creator during times of uncertainty- knowing that I do have the power to get out of my own way and allow for the unfoldment of flow and connection.

I learned from hard earned lessons that how I would respond to life was far more critical than what I had survived or would. I learned that choosing to embody this truth would open me into greater expansion, and also liberate me from unnecessary suffering.
It still can. It still does. Therefore, I choose to breathe into this expansion, allowing it to fill and feed me, to quench my thirst.

I acknowledge that
I cannot
simultaneously live
in my victim story
and also a
story of
confidence and empowerment.

I see this experience of living life as a path towards personal evolution - as a way to travel deep into inner dimensions. I understand that relationships are the mirrors for my soul's lessons - the nutrients of the healing and the growth that is possible and can
bring great joy and heartfelt connection into my life.

Carrying a passion for expressing my evolving selfhood into creative form has been my saving grace. It was no accident that my soul chose my parents, because like difficult life lessons shared through generational trauma, the gift of creative brilliance was also available as a child of these two unique beings and their/my own ancestors. This coupled with a fated encounter and befriending by a neighbor, a professional artist and contemporary of Hemingway, exposed me to
creative possibility, an artist's life. I was blessed to live in a culturally rich city and also share time with nature in my family's summer home.

In the second grade, I had a profound experience of making art with a classmate after school in his home, also with his younger brother present. This experience was other worldly. Attention and care were given to us in a serene environment, I was exposed to a kind of safety and nurturing environment which I was lacking at home.
Life most certainly provided you with glimpses of what was possible...

I have learned to keep turning towards the creative path, the life filled with options,
choices, and therefore empowerment. I have learned to cultivate those earlier glimpses into expansive spaces. I am learning that to make my own amends to those I have harmed, is to live a more loving life, to make more informed and less reactive choices in the moment and to be a healing presence in the world.

I understand this process as one of embracing all parts of myself and my story and honoring my own humanity - including my vulnerability and my divinity - a sacredness that is inherent. This is a path towards connection to Source Creator, and fruitful integration, including empathy and compassion for others. All others, as in the 100%. The thing is, we do not have to get absorbed into everyone's story. Everyone has their own spiritual path - even if from our perspective it looks like utter chaos. Cultivating safe boundaries and loving and letting go from a distance is acceptable and necessary for our own sanity, health and prosperity. Empaths and sensitives, because we can intuitively experience so much on so many levels, can become self-sacrificing and attached to outcomes - needing to be in control. Why? Because we can see straight to the core of an issues and are attuned for how to resolve it - or so we think. However, empaths have a strong intersection with codependency! Over time, I suffered from extreme burnout from overwhelm as a single parent (to a then teen) while navigating my mother's care without any sibling support - nor sustaining financial contributions from state or otherwise. This kind of burnout is typed compassion fatigue.

It has been necessary for me to come back to recovery work time and again throughout my adult life. I recently made a commitment to my codependency recovery - having moved through any previous barriers that posed past resistance. Surrendering is a powerful action to take once one comes to awareness and acceptance. So, what if none of us were single handedly here to take on every unjust issue, solve all the world's problems and save the planet? How would we live, how would we love? It has been said that if you rescue someone from the consequences of their own behavior, you should be prepared to do it again...this speaks to more of my growth in learning to say NO, in letting go, in staying in my own lane. I continue to be astounded by how the body informs throughout the healing and regenerative processes!

Another point about the life of the empath (and those experiencing codependency) that has supportive narratives which speak to a critical dynamic is relationship partnering between empaths and those locked into narcissistic behaviors. It is real and common.

If you need support, are in acute distress and are not safe in any relationship, seek professional help. I support you partnering with a counselor throughout a process, should you work with me, that will disrupt old patterning. No matter how gently we journey, you will begin to encounter parts of you calling for deeper healing. We hold space for this process, we call in your allies, we apply healing modalities that you summon. We are worthy of support and we can cultivate the willingness to journey into our healing path. Life is complex and we each have to find and develop tools that work towards our best wellbeing - if we are ready to divest from old stories, and have the love and joy we deserve and can imagine. We can understand ourselves and our paths in new ways. We can nurture an unfoldment of becoming, a surrendering into the mystery and turning towards trusting in ourselves, the Universe, and an interconnection to all of life.

If you are reading this, thank-you and welcome to our potential partnering! Thank you for your curiosity and for your own desire and willingness to lead a more creative and authentic life- where you can cultivate a sense of curiosity while welcoming back the parts of you that call for compassion, understanding, integration and flow.

You are whole. You are enough. You can know yourself as whole and experiencing wellbeing and worthiness no matter what your life circumstances have been.

What if life were a series of initiations? We can and do heal, grow, evolve, become, create and ascend - reach a higher understanding and consciousness, which allows for
coming into our potentiality.

We are not only capable of transmuting darkness into light and love, it is our birthright to do so! We are all witnesses to this truth.

"We have all kinds of ways to keep pain at a distance. But that effort comes with a cost of seeing the truth, seeing what's real and what's true. If we are operating under delusion, we are not going to be able to accomplish anything of value." CHARLES EISENSTEIN

Integration Happens

If you are ready to journey into a more expansive and creative life, I am honored to facilitate you growing into your potential. Your journey is calling to you. You are your own leader, leading your life. Come journey into a creative life embracing the mystery and become the Creator of your New Story. Everyone is born with a potential for becoming an artist. We begin there. The most important artist alive today is the one living inside of you. Your creativity can become a wellspring of information for you, providing meaning
through intuitive processes, always able to assist you in life and on this
mysterious and magical path, your unique journey.

Trauma, loss and illness can be experienced as a kind of soul fragmentation when left unmetabolized. We have learned that the body holds wounding. These wounds are the needed entryway towards personal evolution.
Through integrative practices, you can re-member.

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.” HERMANN HESSE, SIDDHARTHA

For myself, the path of Shamanism is a direct path of revelation. Shamanic artmaking therefore is a tool to inform, to give form to what is unconscious,
to midwife emerging energy.

I hope for you to become at ONE with this way as a tool and also a practice of embracing the totality of who you are. The tools provided can allow you to become informed and carry you into wisdom, knowingness and trust. It is within our nature to change and evolve.
We are the architects of this process.

As an Integration Coach, I am available to guide you with a specific challenge which you may be experiencing - anything that is making you feel disconnected from self, and separate from others or from Source/Creator/God/Intuition/Nature. I also work as an Intensive Guide - which is based on a four week commitment journeying with my own
unique offering, The Exquisite Mandala. 

YOUR CART

I acknowledge that
I cannot
simultaneously live
in my victim story
and also a
story of
confidence and empowerment.

read about ARTMAKING AS SOUL RETRIEVAL

visit CONTACT page

YOUR CART

I acknowledge that I cannot ​simultaneously livein my victim storyand also a​story of​confidence and empowerment.

read about ARTMAKING AS SOUL RETRIEVALvisit CONTACT page

I acknowledge that
I cannot
simultaneously live
in my victim story
and also a
story of
confidence and empowerment.

read about ARTMAKING AS SOUL RETRIEVAL

visit CONTACT page